An old man with the tall tri-corner Kazakh hat rode a donkey down the street, leading a straggly procession of thirty or so schoolchildren. Daily life is enough of an omen that Kazakhstan isn’t Kansas and things often aren’t as expected, but the negation of one idea still leaves me unprepared for what I do find. And even when I pessimistically do expect trouble with local men, it surprises me yet with a new form.

Across the world, an intercity bus arriving late is nothing new, and so I waited forty minutes for my friend, a volunteer, who was coming in from another town in our region. This wait was when the donkey procession passed me by. It was a nice break from the rest of what became routine. For the first thirty minutes, a young man who looked Kazakh spoke Russian with me, never seeming to fully believe that I don’t speak Russian, and never caring that I clearly did not want to speak to him. The body language that says “don’t approach me” in the States says nothing here, for he came up to me as I sat, trying to memorize a Carl Sandburg poem I wanted to teach. Between my small headscarf, my tiny handwriting that even I can’t always easily read, and the likelihood of my being one of Kazakhstan’s < 0.1% Americans, he thought I was a Turk studying Arabic. Sadly, I’m something more fascinating, even though my standard responses to his questions were “I don’t understand;” “I don’t know;” and “There is a problem because you speak Russian, I speak Kazakh, and I do not understand your language.” Unless he simply likes infuriating random people, I can’t figure out how he could find a half hour of my responses to be worth either his time or mine.

He thought I was lying about not speaking Russian; perhaps he hoped I would finally cave in and speak it (not being able to communicate with people is a great reason not to study a language). I was lying, to a point. I really can understand /kak vas zovyt/ (what is your name?); /atkuda/ (a question to which the proper answer is ‘I’m from America’); and /ghosting/ (an invitation to come as a guest to his house). On the other hand, my Russian really is so poor that I cannot count all the numbers to ten, and how plausible is it that he did not know how to ask, in either Kazakh or the English that every child in every village loves to shout, ‘what is your name?’ And I could not shake this fellow, not by sitting near the old women selling small items, nor by standing by the taxi drivers outside in the cold and walking circles to keep a column as a separator between us. My harassment was the viewer’s amusement, as some laughed and I fumed until my friend’s bus finally came.

She had come that afternoon because that night we were taking the train together to Kyzylorda, an oil city of 150,000 that lies about eight hours west of my town. Our train left Arys at 2:00 a.m., so my host mother arranged a taxi for us. Another omen: about a hundred yards short of the train station, our car stalled out. All but the driver piled out, and the car was push-started for the last of its journey. This seemed to just portend amusing problems, but it was quickly followed by another omen. We were at the train station a half hour early for the train, and my family’s chauffeur, who had come with us, had disappeared to buy wine for the obligatory pre-travel toast (I cringe to say that my family has a chauffeur, but that’s another story). In other words, the sober, trustworthy man disappeared, leaving my friend and I in the car with the taxi driver and his wife. The taxi driver who, unbeknownst to us, had been taking vodka shots in the car between the time he showed up at my house and when we left, and his wife, who sat like a statue as her drunk husband leaned over and flirted heavily with us until the chauffeur returned and calmly encouraged him to be quiet and scoot back into his own seat.

After the minimal toasts and after the two men saw us to our seats on the train, we saw what the most recent omen had foretold: two drunk men had the other bunks in our coupee. A coupee is a small cabin with two sets of bunk beds, a small table, and a sliding door that locks from the inside. It’s recommended over the more open platskart for two young women traveling long-distances or overnight (nothing gets a consensus recommendation for one woman traveling such a trip alone, other than to hope that luck places you with the babushkas). Just to make matters better, were it not for her personality and companionship, my friend would be an awful person to travel with. She’s more petite than I am, prettier, and Iranian-American, which yields another sets of questions and comments, some of which are rude by American standards. Where are the people who moonlight as bouncers when I need them?

At first, we could not figure out which bunks to take, for the men had disembarked for more beer, leaving their vodka and empties on the table, and their things strewn across three bunks. Only one black leather jacket was on the fourth bunk. Moving that jacket to the other upper bunk might have been a mistake, for it gave them more ammunition to shout at us with when they returned, but I moved it anyway, and we sat together on that last upper bunk. When the men came in, they were mad from the beginning, first about the jacket, then demanding to see my friend’s ticket and passport (though never mine), and then again because we both held a hand on those documents and would not let them out of our possession. One man claimed to be a train police, but I saw nothing like a badge.

When things calmed down, we talked about the bunks: we each had one upper bunk and one lower bunk, but they showed no sign of wanting to leave their seats on opposite sides of the table, and agreed to let us have both of the uppers. After that, they wanted me to drink with them and demanded this repeatedly, as much as I protested that I never drink because I’m an athlete (isn’t it nice to know that your government organization’s standard advice for tricky situations is simply to lie. For locals who don’t drink, being a sportsman is a common enough reason; next time, I’m going to try being religious). After one woman, who worked on the train as a conductor and possibly also as a seller of her own self, came in and chatted with the men for a while, the most disagreeable man left with her and we risked sleep. It was about 4:00 a.m. At 5:00 a.m., I woke up to hear my friend yelling at that disagreeable man, for she had found him standing between our two beds, staring at us as we lay there. After a while he sat, and we neither slept after that.

Not two minutes after we got off in Kyzylorda and started waiting for the local volunteers who would be meeting us did a good man find us. He is an import to the Peace Corps from Illinois, who lives in northern Kazakhstan at Kokshetau, our train’s other terminus. He had been in platskart on our train. We had no problems on the return trip from Kyzylorda, because he rode in a coupee with us (This was an unexpected kindness from the station agent who sold us our tickets. She had a brusque and unhappy manner, and said it was forbidden for us to share a coupee with him because our two destinations were so far apart. We figured a 500 tenge bribe would convince the conductor, but when we checked our seat assignments, we found she had put us together after all.)

The train after ours came in from Almaty, and on it was a volunteer who was changing sites from Turkestan (an hour north of Arys and seven east of Kyzylorda) to Kyzylorda, so we stayed around with the other volunteers who’d met us to be the greeters and luggage help. As she and two of the guys were on the train collecting the last of them, the train took off. A few people jumped from open doors, including one volunteer, a box under each of his arms, who’d had to push bast the conductor to leap. He was quite proud of himself, and we were all quite worried. Where was this train going, when would it stop, how would our friends get back to Kyzylorda, and would they get in trouble for not having tickets? Only the director of the just-moved volunteer’s university seemed mostly unperturbed. After fifteen minutes of loading the luggage into a van and wandering around concerned, the two volunteers walked up. The train cars were simply being shuffled around, and they had walked back from some place down the tracks where it had stopped. This, I think, is what the omen of the push-started car foretold.

But my week in Kyzylorda was front-loaded with problems, and after the stress of getting there, all went quite well. Kazakhs spit on babies after praising them, giving the baby enough bad and sickness that the jealous Evil Eye doesn’t come with further curses. I suppose my Evil Eye just struck at the beginning. After that, it was wonderful to relax into being an American on vacation, no longer my town’s representative of the American people and government, officially at work 24 hours a day (this has nice benefits with FEMA: I’m covered if all the eggs I eat as cheap protein give me high cholesterol). Instead, I became someone who still stuck out in a crowd, but maybe just the smallest part of that was because, in a city where most people dress fashionably and professionally, I was in the tiny group of people with the turtlenecks under hooded sweatshirts, and I in the hooded parka bulky enough for another coat underneath when the winter grows colder (it’s doubtful whether I’d walk through downtown Chicago with such disdain for looking halfway decent, but I was not out to impress anyone, and it gets cold in the desert winds when I meet other people who also like walking around outside for several hours at a time). Or perhaps there’s nothing I can do to cut down on the stares from those who don’t figure I’m Turkish, or a Russian-speaking Canadian.

Technically, though, I was not on vacation but at work, for I had gone to Kyzylorda for a Kazakh language camp held during the schools’ fall break. I now understand far more about subordinating clauses and participle verb forms than I could have ever learned on my own with the materials I’ve got at hand, and I can finally say “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” substituting ‘beaver’ and ‘throw’ for the words that make it a tongue-twister. But as fascinating as Kazakh grammar is — and I mean no sarcasm here, for I can increase my vocabulary through the dictionary but I need classes to increase the range of concepts I can say — the language camp was an excuse to organize a reunion of the Kazakh language volunteers who lived in one village together during training. These are the people I went to see, to say “Can I do this? Is it worth all my problems and complaints and all that I’m giving up by being here?”And to laugh, as friends can laugh over shared jokes, the same cultural references, and one strange new country to call home.

And the end of the day was the time to cook American food or go out for excellent pizza, and watch “Fahrenheit 9/11” and a television show set in Los Vegas, and to play Trivial Pursuit as Illinois v. the World. It was like the Real World, if they went on beer runs, slept in a row on the floor to conserve body heat because there weren’t enough beds or blankets, bathed in buckets of heated water, twice dismantled the plumbing under the kitchen sink in order to fix a problem the landlord had long ignored, rejoiced in Nestle’s 1.5 % milkfat pasteurized milk that was safe to drink because it was kept in the fridge except for when it was being poured into countless cups of tea, and said a farewell toast over real coffee brewed in an American-style filter coffee pot.

I still have no better idea of how to handle many problems with my school and co-teachers; if the advice of turning a blind eye to what I cannot change turns out to be the right way to approach things, then it will be a while longer yet for me to accept that. But I do have a better idea of how I can reach people outside my school. I’d like to work with another volunteer in my area on creating a series of grammar seminars for teachers, re-teaching what they’ve forgotten or never learned, and teaching them good ways to explain the grammar to their students and exercises to run with the most minimal of resources and preparation. Currently, most volunteer-led exercises are on teaching methodologies and learning styles. I’d like to first make sure that what the teachers teach is factually correct. So far, this is just a dream, but I think it’s a plausible one. I’m also resolved to email my two legal contacts — a law university and the ABA’s Central European and Eurasian Law Initiative — to see if they could use a volunteer in the area, for I’m outside of the major city of Shymkent. Even if I can’t teach as I’d like within the classroom, maybe I can outside of it. Seeing another beautiful summer in-country, working with volunteers at some camp or project that’s not in the desert, is seeming more likely.

Since it's snowing hither and yon. . . .

She tells her love while half asleep,
      In the dark hours,
            With half-words whispered low:
As Earth stirs in her winter sleep
      And puts out grass and flowers
            Despite the snow,
            Despite the falling snow.